By Hilary White
September 12, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - With Britain facing this October its 40th anniversary of the legalizing of abortion the issue is finding its way into the mainstream British press. Today's Daily Mail, whose "small-c" editorial policy makes it Britain's largest circulating daily newspaper, is carrying a series of interviews titled, "What WE think of abortion - by the women who had them..."
The story covers interviews with six women, two of whom say they have "no regrets", chronicling the horrors of abortion.
But a US blogger is calling foul and asking why the Daily Mail is censoring its own, powerful coverage.
Dawn Eden is asking why the Mail is trying to hide the seventh interview. Eden is a former rock and roll groupie and New York music journalist whose dramatic conversion to Catholicism, as recorded in her book, "The Thrill of the Chaste", has given her iconic status among her young online devotees. She writes on her popular weblog, The Dawn Patrol, that when Dawn Eden read the story of Ashleigh Taylor, she found it so graphic that she singled it out for coverage, only to find it had been removed the next day from the online edition by the Daily Mail.
She writes that the stories' emotional power might have prompted the Mail to remove the most graphic of the group. "Even the ones with women who do not regret their abortions reveal severely damaged lives," Eden wrote today.
A small editing error remains at the top of the story in the Mail's online edition where the introduction is for seven interviews. Today's Daily Mail retains only six.
Of the six young women who told the Mail about their abortion experiences, five of them say they "regret" having taken their children's lives.
Sarah Giles, 27, a sales representative for a computer company who aborted her child two years ago, said the abortion limit "should definitely" be reduced to 13 weeks. "I was only six weeks pregnant when I had my abortion, and even then I had bonded with my baby," she told the Mail. Sarah called her abortion experience "a scene from hell."
"I'd been going out with Mike for a year and a half when I got pregnant. We weren't using contraception and he freaked out. He said we didn't have the money, that it was too soon in our careers, and it would ruin our lives."
Sarah still lives with the boyfriend and hopes someday to marry him and have other children. But she says she will "never forget" her first.
Dawn Eden includes a link to a screen capture of the missing interview in which Ashleigh says that "despite the guilt" she has no regrets. Ashleigh told the Mail that at 15 weeks and two days of pregnancy, she went with a friend to the local hospital where a nurse "gave me tablets to bring on labour".
"It was horrendous. After two hours the contractions started…Once I felt the baby starting to come, I had to go to the toilet and let it drop into a stainless steel tray." The midwife attending her, told Ashleigh, "Don't look. Keep your eyes straight in front of you and walk away immediately."
Ashleigh survived the abortion and coped with life as a university student "by just blanking the abortion out." Despite the horror of her experience and the ongoing trauma, she maintains that the abortion limit should not be reduced to 13 weeks "because that would have been too late for me to have my abortion."
Read the Daily Mail story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk /pages/live/femail/article .html?in_article_id=481313&in_page_id=1879
To write to the Daily Mail
Letters to the Editor: letters@dailymail.co.uk
Read Dawn Eden's coverage and the missing interview:
http://www.dawneden.com/2007 /09/dont-look-said-midwife.html
